The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  When she had rendered him quite harmless, she went up on deck. In a minute she was back, tying him round the middle with rope and thus dragging him, bump by bump, up the narrow stair well. The stiff canvas protected him from the harder knocks. When he reached deck level, Tyne began yelling for mercy. His voice was hopelessly muffled.

  He was pulled across the deck to the rail.

  Sweating, kicking feebly, he felt himself being lowered over the side. This is it, Leslie, he told himself in furious despair. He was swinging free. Then he felt the blessed hardness of a boat beneath him. The girl had put him into what seemed to be a rowing boat.

  Tyne was still half-swooning with relief when the girl landed beside him. The boat rocked gently, then shot away from the ketch. So it had a motor: but the motor was completely silent.

  A momentary, irrelevant insight into the way Rosks got away with so much came to him. The average Sumatran is a very poor man. His horizon is of necessity bounded by economic need. The concept of world loyalty is not beyond him, but the chance to sell a fishing boat, or a knife, or a ketch, at a staggering profit is something which cannot be forgone.

  To a considerable extent, the Rosks had found themselves on neutral ground. Power politics is a hobby the poor cannot afford. Absolute poverty, like absolute power, corrupts absolutely.

  ‘I can help you in some way, Todpuddle,’ Benda Ittai said, resting her hand on the sail imprisoning Tyne.

  By now, the situation was so much beyond Tyne, and to hear her speak English was so reassuring, that he could only think to mumble through his sheet, ‘My name’s Tyne Leslie.’

  ‘The others in my party do not know I speak Earthian,’ she said. ‘I have learnt it secretly from your telecasts.’

  ‘There must be quite a bit about you they don’t know,’ he said. ‘Let me out of this portable tomb! You really had me frightened back there, believe me.’

  She cut away at the canvas with her sharp knife. She would only make a hole for his face, so that he lolled in the bows like a mummy, staring at her.

  Benda Ittai was as nervous as a courting mole.

  ‘Don’t look at me as if I am a traitor to my race,’ she said uneasily. ‘It is not so.’

  ‘That was not quite what I was thinking,’ he replied, grinning involuntarily. ‘But how do you come into the picture? What are you to do with Murray?’

  ‘Never mind me. Never mind anything! All this business is too big for you. Just be content I do not let you drown. It is enough for one day.’

  The sea was still lake-calm. The mist still hung patchily about. Benda was steering by compass, and in a minute a small island, crowned with the inevitable palms, waded out of the blankness towards them. The girl cut the engine, letting them drift in towards a strip of beach lying between two arms of vegetation.

  ‘I shall leave you here and you can take your chance,’ she said. ‘When Budo Budda returns to the boat, I tell him my duty is performed. Here the water is shallow enough. I will cut your binding and you will wade ashore. No doubt that a passing boat will soon see you.’

  ‘Look,’ he said desperately, as she severed the cocoon of sail, ‘I’m very grateful to you for saving my life, but please, please, what is all this about?’

  ‘I tell you the business is too large for you. With that, please be content.’

  ‘Benda, that sort of talk implies I’m too small for the business. That’s bad for my complexes. You must tell me what’s happening. How can this information Murray has be so vital that everyone is willing to commit murder to get it?’

  She made him climb overboard before she would loosen his wrists, in case he pounced on her. He stood waist-deep in water. She tossed the knife to him. As he stooped to retrieve it, glittering like a fish under water, she called, ‘Your Murray carries what you would name a microfilm. On this film is a complete record of the imminent invasion of Earth by an Alpha fleet of ships. Our ship which arrived here five years ago is not what you think it is; your people were misled. It is only a forward reconnaissance weapon, designed to make a preliminary survey for those who are now coming to invade. Against the slaughter to come, you or I, whatever we feel, can do nothing. Already it is really too late. Goodbye!’

  Tyne stood in the sea helplessly, watching till she vanished into the golden mist.

  IV

  THE solar system progressed towards the unassailable summer star, Vega. The Earth–Moon system wobbled round the sun, host and parasite eternally hand-in-hand. The planet spun on its rocky, unimaginable axis. The oceans swilled for ever uneasily in their shallow beds. Tides of multifarious life twitched across the continents. On a small island a man sat and hacked at the casing of a coconut.

  His watch told him that it was 4.20, local time. It would be dark in three hours. If the heat mist held till sunset his chances of being picked up today were negligible.

  Tyne stood up, still chewing the last morsel of coconut flesh, and flung the empty case into the water. In a few minutes, it drifted ashore again. He fumed at his own helplessness. Without the sun, he could not even tell in which direction Sumatra lay. There, wherever it was, the fate of man was being decided. If World Government could get hold of that precious spool of microfilm, counter measures could effectively be taken. Stobart had spoken vaguely of ‘information’; did he know the true value of what Murray was carrying? It seemed possible that Tyne was the only man in the world who knew just what tremendous stakes were in the balance.

  Or did Murray know?

  Murray had killed his friend and would betray his kind. What sort of a man was he?

  ‘If ever I get my hands on him …’ Tyne said.

  He was determined that he would no longer be a pawn in the big game. As soon as possible, he would take the initiative. Unknown forces had hitherto carried him round, much as the revolving equator did; from now on, he would move for himself.

  Accordingly, he made a tour of the island on which he had been marooned. It was not much more than ten acres in extent, probably an outlying member of the Mentawai group. On its far side, overlooking a tumbled mass of rock which extended far into the sea, was a ruined fortification. Possibly it dated from the Java–Sumatra troubles of the mid-twentieth century.

  The fortification consisted of two rooms. In the inner one, a table rotted and an iron chest rusted. Inside the chest lay a broken lantern, a spade and a pick. Mildewed shelving lined one wall of the place.

  For the next few hours, Tyne was busy building his own defences. He was not going to be caught helpless again.

  As he worked, his brain ran feverishly over what the alien girl had told him. He was simultaneously appalled at the naïvete of Earth in accepting as the simple truth the tale the Rosks had spun on arrival, and at the mendacity of Alpha II in thus taking advantage of man’s generous impulses. Yet it was difficult to see how either side could have behaved differently. Earth had no reason to believe the Rosk ship was other than what it claimed to be. And if the Rosks were truly set on invasion, then from a military point of view their preliminary survey of Earth’s physical and mental climate was indeed a sound one.

  Exasperation saturated Tyne, as it so frequently had done in the old days round the UNC’s shiny council tables. For these damnable oppositions, it seemed useless to blame the persons involved; rather, one had to curse the forces that made them what they were.

  After he had been working for an hour, a light breeze rose; the mist cleared, the sun shone. Low clouds in the horizon marked the direction of Sumatra. Tyne’s clothes dried off, his mescahale lighter functioned again. He built himself a bonfire, lit it, and worked by its flickering radiance when the sun went down.

  At last his work completed, he flung himself down on the sand, overlooking the beach where Benda Ittai had left him. The lights of one or two atomic freighters showed in the distance, taking no notice of his beacon. He slept.

  When he woke, it was to cold and cramp. A chill wind blew. The time was only 9.40. Low over the sea a segment of moon rose, c
ool and superb. And a fishing boat was heading towards the island.

  Tyne was going to be rescued! At the sight of the reassuringly familiar shape of a local boat, he realised how much he had dreaded seeing Budo Budda’s ketch instead. At once he was jubilant.

  ‘Here! Here I am! Help!’ he called in Malayan, jumping up and flinging fresh wood on to his fire. The fishing boat moved rapidly, and was already near enough for the hiss of its progress over the water to be heard.

  The boat carried a dim light halfway up the mast. Three men sat in it. One of them cried out in answer as they collapsed the single sail. The boat nosed in, bumping against the sand.

  On his way down to meet them, Tyne paused. These men were muffled like Arabs. And one of them – that was a weapon in his hand! Alarm seized him. He turned to run.

  ‘Stand still, Tyne Leslie!’

  Reluctantly, he stopped and turned. Of the two who had jumped from the boat, one had flung back his hood. In the moonlight, his shock of white hair was dazzling, like a cloud round his head. It was War Colonel Budo Budda. He was aiming his gun up the beach at Tyne.

  They were not twenty yards apart, Budda and his fellow Rosk standing by the lapping sea, Tyne up the narrow beach, near the fringe of trees. It was a lovely night, so quiet you could hear your own flesh crawl.

  ‘Is good of you to light a signal to guide us,’ Budda said. ‘We grew tired of searching little islands for you.’

  At the words, Tyne realised that their finding him was no accident. His heart sank still further as he realised that there was only one source from which they could have learnt he was still alive. Without thinking, he blurted out, ‘Where is Benda Ittai?’

  Budda laughed. It sounded like a cough.

  ‘We have her safe. She is a fool, but a dangerous one. She is a traitor. We long suspected it, and set a trap to catch her. We did not leave her alone on the boat with you, as we declared we would; secretly, a man was hidden to watch her. When she returned alone, having left you here, he confronted her and overpowered her.’

  Whatever they had done to her, she had evidently not revealed where she had left him. That girl was a good one, Rosk or no Rosk. Tyne thought with compunction of her returning to the ketch, only to be jumped on. He remembered her nervousness; the memory seemed to come back to him like a fresh wind.

  ‘You’re too bloody clever, Budda!’ he shouted. ‘You’ll die of it one day.’

  ‘But not today,’ Budda said. ‘Come down here, Tyne. I want to know what the Ittai woman told you.’

  So that was why they did not shoot him outright! They needed to find out if Benda had passed on anything they did not know.

  Without answering, he turned and ran up the beach, pelting for the trees. At once he heard the sound of firing; the unmistakable high-pitched hiss of the Roskian service gun, a big .88 with semi-self-propelled slugs. Then he was among the trees and the undergrowth, black, hunched, reassuring, in the dark.

  He began immediately to double over to the left, on a course that would bring him rapidly back to the sea without leaving the shelter of the trees. As he dodged along he looked frequently over his shoulder. Budda and companion were momentarily nonplussed; after the poor performance Tyne had made earlier in their hands, they probably had not expected him to show initiative. After holding a brief confab, they took a torch from the boat and commenced up the beach at a trot, calling his name.

  By this time, Tyne had worked round to their flank. He crouched on a low cliff directly overlooking boat and beach. Groping in the undergrowth, he found three hefty stones.

  At that moment, the two Rosks were running to the top of the beach. Tyne held his breath. They yelled together, their torch went spinning, they crashed into the trap he had prepared earlier on. To guard against eventualities, Tyne had used the spade he discovered to dig a deep trench in the sand across the path anyone heading inland would take. Covered with the rotted shelving from the old fortification, which in its turn was covered lightly with sand, it made a perfect trap. As the Rosks stepped on the concealed boards, they pitched through into the trench. Owing to the steep lie of the beach at this point, an avalanche of fine sand immediately poured upon them.

  Tyne’s advantage could be only temporary, a matter of seconds at best.

  As the Rosk in the boat stood up to see what the trouble was, Tyne flung the first stone at him. The man was clearly outlined against bright water, and only a few yards away. The stone struck his arm. He turned, raising a .88. A chunk of rock the size of a man’s foot caught him in the stomach.

  Almost as he doubled up, Tyne was down the sandy cliff and on top of him. He sprang like a leopard, knocking the Rosk flat. A clout over the head with another stone laid him out cold. Tyne pitched him unceremoniously out on to the wet sand, jumped out himself, and pushed the boat savagely out to sea. Flinging himself after it he climbed aboard and hoisted the sail. A bullet from the shore shattered the lamp on the mast. Tyne felt oil and glass spatter his flesh. He laughed.

  Turning he saw two figures, black against the sand, climb out of his trap and run to the water. They fired again. The big bullets whined out to sea as Tyne dropped flat.

  Rosks could swim like sharks. In their first year on earth, before the trouble began, they had entered the Olympic Games and won all the aquatic events with ease. No doubt they could swim as fast as a fishing boat moving in a light breeze.

  Fumbling into the bottom of the boat, Tyne’s steel left hand found the gun dropped by the Rosk he had overpowered. He grabbed it with a whispered word of thanks.

  Budda and his companion were wading out, still firing and clutching their torch. They made perfect targets. Steadying his aim over the side of the boat, Tyne drew a bead on the War-Colonel. The wind was taking the sail now, making the boat dip as it left the lee of the island. He tried to synchronise his firing with the motion, ignoring a hissing missile that slashed through a plank not a foot from his face.

  It was funny to be trying to kill someone on such a grand night … Now!

  The Rosk weapon was superb. Recoil was non-existent. Across the level waters, not so many yards from the boat, Budda croaked once like a frog and pitched forward into the sea, carrying the torch with him.

  ‘My God!’ Tyne said. He said it again and again, as his boat gathered speed, dragging him over the moon-smeared waves. After the shock of killing came the exultation of it; he was almost frightened by the savage delight of his new mood. He could do anything. He could save the world.

  The exultation quenched itself as he wondered where Budo Budda was now; whether anything of the Rosk survived apart from the body peering fixedly down into dark water. Then Tyne deliberately turned to face more practical matters.

  * * *

  Midnight was an hour and a half away. Time slid away from him like the wake of the boat. Murray had to be found before the Rosks reached him – unless he had been found already. Obviously, the first thing to be done on reaching the mainland was for Tyne to report all he knew to Stobart, or to someone in authority. To think to continue a lone hunt for Murray was foolish: yet Tyne found himself longing to do just that, to confront the monster, to …

  Yes, he wanted to kill the big, laconic space captain. Even – and it was shrinkingly he recognised the urge in himself – he wanted to feel that terrible exhilaration of killing for its own sake.

  But another side of his nature merely wanted to solve the puzzle of Murray’s disappearance and all that hung upon it. Merely! Tyne fumed to think he had been unconscious during those vital seconds in Area 101, of which Murray had given one account, Stobart another. The truth might lie in either or neither of them, and the truth might never be revealed. Truth was a primal force, almost like gravity; like gravity, it was always there, yet some people never even realised its presence.

  Pocketing the .88 gun, Tyne steadied the high, stiff tiller. One of his earliest memories, half embedded in the silt of forgetting, was of himself in his pram and certainly not more than three years old. He
was throwing a toy out of his pram. The toy fell to the ground. Every time he threw it, the fool thing went down. He tried with other toys, with his shoes, his hat, his blankets. They all went down. He still remembered the disappointment of it. Even today, he still hated that lack of choice.

  Truth had the same inevitability about it; he just had to go on throwing facts overboard and it would eventually reveal itself to him. This time it was worth persevering: the future of Earth hung upon it.

  At the moment, it seemed to him almost an abstract problem. He knew he should be hating the Rosks, the five thousand of them here, the millions of them mustering back on Alpha II. Yet the hate did not work; could that be merely because he knew one of them to be both brave and beautiful?

  He switched his attention to sailing. The sail was cumbersome, the boat did not handle readily. It would probably, Tyne reflected, take him longer to get back from the island to Sumatra than the scout ships took from Sumatra to Luna. Progress was a fever from which many parts of the world were immune; a thousand centuries on, and paddy fields would still be cultivated by hand. For a race set on attaining their blessings in the life to come, material innovation may be a complete irrelevance. Tyne, consequently, was going where the wind blew.

  But he was lucky. A south-east monsoon wind had him. In half an hour, the coast was in sight. In another hour, Tyne was steering in under the dark cliffs, looking for a place to scramble ashore. On a small, rocky promontory, two native huts sagged under their load of thatch; a yellow light burned in one of them. Running the boat ashore on sand and stones, Tyne climbed out and made for the dwellings.

  Among the trees stood a small kampong. It smelt good: smoky and sweet. Tyne found an old man, smoking the last half-inch of a cheroot in the moonlight, who would lead him to a road. As they walked, Tyne learnt with relief that he was no more than a dozen miles south of Padang.